Anna Nicole Smith, the small-town Texas girl turned Playboy Playmate who fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court over her billionaire husband’s estate, died suddenly on Thursday at the age of 39.
Smith, a voluptuous platinum blonde who grew up idolising the late screen legend Marilyn Monroe, was pronounced dead at a Hollywood, Florida, hospital.
A favourite subject of the tabloid media, Smith was rushed to the hospital after a private nurse who had apparently been alone with her in her room at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino telephoned a hotel operator to ask for medical help.
”I can confirm that she is deceased. It’s as shocking to me as to you guys,” Smith’s attorney, Ronald Rale, told Reuters.
Her lawyer and husband, Howard K Stern, ”obviously is speechless and grieving,” Rale said.
An autopsy was scheduled for Friday to determine the cause of death, which was quickly linked by some commentators to reports of drug abuse and came at a time of grief and fresh legal wrangles for Smith.
Just five months ago, Smith’s 20-year-old son from her first marriage, Daniel, died in a Bahamas hospital three days after she gave birth to her daughter, Dannielyn Hope Marshall Stern. She then quickly became embroiled in a paternity suit over the baby girl filed by an ex-boyfriend, Larry Birkhead.
Smith was ordered to have her infant daughter undergo a paternity test, and on Wedensday, the day before her death, a judge set a February 21 deadline for completion of that test.
Smith had said Stern was the father.
Wanted to be like Marilyn
Within hours of Smith’s death, Birkhead’s lawyer Debra Opri sought an emergency order for DNA tests on the body as part of the paternity battle. A hearing was scheduled for Friday morning in Los Angeles Superior Court in the matter.
The hotel told reporters Smith had checked in on Monday and was scheduled to leave on Friday. Her daughter was not with her and sources said the child was being cared for in the Bahamas.
Her sister, Donna Hogan, told CNN she had spoken little to Smith in the last decade and learned of her death through the news media.
”Its shocking,” she said. ”But at the same time I’m not really shocked because of her lifestyle. In the back of your mind you know that someday it might happen.”
Born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised in the small Texas town of Mexia, about 130km south of Dallas, Smith grew up saying she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe, who came from a troubled childhood to become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Monroe was found dead at the age of 36 by her housekeeper on August 5 1962. The cause of death was listed as an overdose of sleeping pills.
Smith also had a difficult childhood and was dogged by talk of addiction to drugs, including prescription painkillers, that was fuelled by her slurred words and unusual behavior at awards shows and other public events.
”I actually went into a coma, you know. I almost died,” she told the Entertainment Tonight show in late 2004. ”I had to rehabilitate myself. And then they took the nurse away, so there I was crawling — crawling to the bathroom and stuff.”
A high school dropout, she was working at Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken restaurant when she married her first husband, Billy Wayne Smith, at 17. She separated from him two years later and moved to Houston.
It was while performing at a Houston topless club that Smith met elderly oil billionaire J Howard Marshall, who asked her repeatedly to marry him before they wed in 1994. She was 26 and he was 89.
Marshall died 14 months later and Smith spent much of the following decade battling members of his family over his estate. In May 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled that Smith could pursue her case in federal court.
Smith, also known for modeling Guess? jeans, was named Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year in 1993 and had film roles that year in The Hudsucker Proxy and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. – Reuters